On 4/3/22 11:52, Brian McCall wrote:
> If you had asked me twenty years ago if I thought units should be a native
part of any
> programming language, I would have said absolutely - because in my youthful
ignorance
> I had no idea what it would take to make such a thing work. Five years later,
I would
> have said "not worth it". Now I'm back where I started. The lack of native
language
> support for SI units is a problem for an entire segment of programmers.
Programming
> languages took a big step forward in deciding that EVERYTHING is a
pointer/reference,
> and EVERYTHING is an object. They need to take another step forward to say
that EVERY
> number has a unit, including "unitless". Not having this language feature is
becoming
> (or already is) a problem. The question is, is it Python's problem?
On 4/3/22 14:20, Ricky Teachey wrote:
> The libraries out there- pint is probably the biggest one- have filled those
gap as much as they can, but there are so
> many shortfalls...
>
> The old engineering disciplines- mine (civil engineering), structural,
electrical, etc- are the next frontier in the
> "software eats the world" revolution, and they desperately need a language
with native units support. I was just on an
> interview call yesterday for a senior engineer role at a large multinational
earth works engineering firm and we spent
> 15 minutes talking about software and what we see coming down the road when
it comes to the need for our discipline to
> grow in its software creation capabilities.
>
> Python SHOULD be that language we do this with. It is awesome in every
other way. But if it isn't DEAD SIMPLE to use
> units in python, it won't happen.
Well, if we're spit-balling ideas, what about:
63_lbs
or
77_km/hr
? Variables cannot start with a number, so there'd be no ambiguity there; we started allowing underbars for separating
digits a few versions ago, so there is some precedent. We could use the asterisk, although I find the underbar easeir
to read.
Mechanically, are `lbs`, `km`, `hr`, etc., something that is imported, or are they tags attached to the numbers? If
attached to the numbers, memory size would increase and performance might decrease -- but, how often do we have a number
that is truly without a unit?
How old are you? 35 years
How much do you weigh? 300 kg
What temperature do you cook bread at? 350 F
--
~Ethan~
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